The ngrok 1.x hosted service

ngrok.com ran a pay-what-you-want hosted service of 1.x from early 2013 until April 7, 2016. Afterwards, it only runs 2.x service.

Production Use

DO NOT RUN THIS VERSION OF NGROK (1.X) IN PRODUCTION. Both the client and server are known to have serious reliability issues including memory and file descriptor leaks as well as crashes. There is also no HA story as the server is a SPOF. You are advised to run 2.0 for any production quality system.

What can I do with ngrok?

Expose any http service behind a NAT or firewall to the internet on a subdomain of ngrok.com

Expose any tcp service behind a NAT or firewall to the internet on a random port of ngrok.com

Inspect all http requests/responses that are transmitted over the tunnel

Replay any request that was transmitted over the tunnel

What is ngrok useful for?

Temporarily sharing a website that is only running on your development machine

Demoing an app at a hackathon without deploying

Developing any services which consume webhooks (HTTP callbacks) by allowing you to replay those requests

Debugging and understanding any web service by inspecting the HTTP traffic

Running networked services on machines that are firewalled off from the internet